The Ministry of Finance has as a priority to prepare budgets for this year and there could be an economic forecast of the future application of drug auctions nationwide. Montero has already warned that his intention is to develop the purchasing system and now has a new ally: Minister José Luis Escrivá, who endorsed him as president of Airef.
The drug auction was devised by the Minister of Finance, Maria Jesus Montero, at the end of the year 2011, when she was a Health Advisor in Andalusia. Since then she has been a strong advocate of the model to the point that last year she transferred her intention to implement it at the national level to Brussels in the Stability Plan. This was based on a report by Airef, who endorsed the model and gave a projection of savings of 1 billion in 2022. Today, the then president of the tax authority, José Luis Escrivá, is Minister of Social Security and Migration.
The drug auction will be one of the main enemies of the pharmaceutical industry in this 2020. The model, which showed some saving capacity but also produced continuous shortages of drugs, is one of the prescriptions that the Ministry of Finance has on the agenda for to alleviate the huge increase in public spending that is planned. This was communicated to the European Commission in 2019 by Minister María Jesús Montero in the update of the Stability Plan and now, that they will begin to prepare the new budgets, “absolute priority of the Ministry”, the emergence of the measure at national level “is not discards “, according to sources of the Treasury.
Widespread criticism
The system has suffered criticism from the entire sector during the years in which it has been in force. The pharmacy lamented the fact that the patients were subjected to continuous changes in presentations of the auctioned medications, a circumstance that can undermine the adherence to the treatment. The national generic industry also positioned itself against the system, since it was expelled despite its contribution to the country's Gross Domestic Product and with the obligation to have its active productions to solve constant drug failures.
When Montero included auctions in the 2020 horizon, it did so based on a report commissioned by Airef on pharmaceutical spending. The president of the entity was then José Luis Escrivá, today Minister of Social Security and Migration in the Government of Sánchez. That work, called Spending Review, assured that the implementation of the measure would be, indeed, this year, and projected a saving of 1,000 million that would be achieved in 2022.
And at the time it was announced that the medication auctions (also endorsed by Pedro Sánchez in social networks) could reach national level, it was estimated that it would be more lax than its Andalusian version. In this autonomous community, for seven years, a model has been used by which the one who gave the lowest offer kept the entire market. Now, given the size and complexity of operating throughout the national territory, the model would allow more than one actor. “Allow to be included in the list of drugs with preference in the dispensation for limited quantities – and in the order of excluded bids – the access to the market of other pharmaceutical companies at the agreed price,” said the report.
One of the most significant symptoms that the national auction can return is what happened in Andalusia last Thursday. The new government has been dismantling the current model (and will continue to do so with the three contests that are still in force today) but the counselor left the belligerence that used to accompany him every time he talked about the model and also changed the speech. In public, he affirmed that “it is committed to reformulate the drug auction system and the centralized purchase”. From his elimination he went on to reformulate without anyone, a priori, having pressured the regional government to moderate his speech. Different sources affirm that from the Treasury they have communicated the intention of applying the model to the autonomous communities and that they will have to comply with it.
